any act which hurts either an
individual or the social interest will as plainly come under a
humanitarian law as the practice of lying: acts which inflict no injury
and have been forbidden only on mystic grounds are not likely to remain
on the moral code of the future. But I am concerned here with a definite
issue, and need discuss general morality only in so far as that issue is
affected.

Here, at least, the way of the humanitarian is plain. Sermons on the
brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God have been totally
ineffective to prevent war and abolish militarism. There is something
incongruous in the introduction into a modern peace-meeting of some
clerical speaker who talks unctuously about the great promise and
precept of Christianity. The meeting itself, being held nineteen
centuries after the promise was made, is a sufficient indication of its
futility. No progress was made or seriously attempted in the work of
peace until a genuine human passion was substituted for that empty
phraseology. The brotherhood of men was, in the Christian sense of that
phrase, too abstruse and precarious a conclusion to be of use in such a
struggle. The plain fact is that it was of no use, and is of no use
to-day. There is, indeed, reason to think that we should make more
progress if we entirely discarded figures of speech like "the
brotherhood of men." The fact that we are all children of God, or
children of Eve, or children of some Tertiary anthropoid, does not very
obviously impose on us the duty not to take up arms in an international
quarrel.

The ultimate basis of morality is, as Schopenhauer said, sympathy,
though in an advanced social order this sentiment approves itself to
the intellect, and its requirements may be precisely formulated by
reason. One is not sure whether there will not be more morality in the
world when the word "morality," with all its mystic entanglements, is
discarded, and we speak plainly of social law. Violence, the infliction
of pain and injustice, is one of the most obvious infractions of social
law, quite apart from any religious commandments. Its social evil is so
obvious that the community has, at an early date in its development,
elaborated a special machinery for restraining it, and has imposed
penalties in this world, whatever it thinks about the next. There may be
questions raised, and one can understand people who are confined to a
religious environment feeling a genuine concern, about o